Great Falls

Great Falls, Beautiful Day

I came back to Great Falls to work on the painting, below, that I'd started on Monday. The ground, in particular, needed nuance. I brightened up the sky where the sun was burning through the trees and built up the purple hills in the background (which are the banks of the Potomac in Maryland). There was still time to take a closer look at the trees on the left side of the horizontal painting -- in the new, vertical painting, I was working on a board with a lot of oil and the paint was sliding everywhere. I need to spend more time on the far shore of the Potomac in that painting, which will be the plan for next week. I fully expect that all of the leaves clinging to the trees will be gone by then.

Doing "Nothing" at Great Falls

On the way out to Great Falls, Virginia, today, I passed a political sign that said a candidate for office "Does Nothing." This might have escaped my notice except that last week I was told by my younger admiring daughter that she wanted to do what I did when she was older -- "nothing." So the phrase "doing nothing" was playing in my head like a stuck song. This is the result of doing nothing all morning, proof perhaps (yet again) that the blacker my mood is, the more light and energy end up in my paintings.

Back to Gaithersburg Town Center

I started this a few weeks ago, glad to get back to work on it more. I can't even begin to describe how much happier I was with a palette full of oil paint after a week painting with acrylics.

Last day in Mexico

Legs

Through the trees at the beach

This is what it feels like coming to the beach -- deep in shade, looking through the manzanita trees and seeing the beach beyond. Jane was wise enough to pull a pareo over herself before she fell asleep and became the inadvertent model for the painting.

more Mexico beach views

I am using a ton of white, being surprised every time I mix paint and find the intensity of the interactive acrylic paints too powerful.

The painting of my friend Teresa is one I started last year, got to work on again this year. Not quite right yet, but getting there.

Painting on the Beach in Mexico

I'm using "interactive acrylic" paints -- a product that's new to me and so far so good. I brought only red, blue, yellow and white and I'm mixing to get color ranges. The Pacific Ocean is an amazing blue green, hard to get right, but I am going to keep trying!

Carousel Sketch at Glen Echo

It's hard to resist painting the garish colors of the historic carousel at Glen Echo... but I did. After about 45 minutes standing under an eave in the rain, this is where my sketch ended up.

I always liked it when I went with small children and they picked the deer or rabbit to ride on instead of the horses.